I remember sitting next to Cam in my room, how uncomfortable he seemed when I asked if his uncle Brian was gay. I wonder what Cam would think of the whole “friend of Dorothy” question. I wonder if he would feel included in this particular lens of the old-school queer community. Then again, Ithink about what it must have been like in the 1960s and ’70s and ’80s, when the old-school queer community waseverything. It was all queer people had. And even then, so many people weren’t able to be a part of that community at all.
I motion for Sunny to scroll to the top of the page.
“The Wiki said the Grand Rapids treasure was found by accident, but clearly it wasn’t,” I say. “These people have done all the work, step by step.”
“But they wanted to stay anonymous for some reason,” Sunny adds.
“Yeah. For some reason.”
I picture Dyslexic Stoner as a little boy, repeating Hail Marys over and over as his mother loomed next to him. The thought makes me unbearably sad.
Chapter Eleven
“I’ve got more page scans!” Gabriel calls.
Julia, Sunny, and I migrate from my station to Gabriel’s. He’s pasted the images from the website over into Adobe Photoshop and is already fiddling with the contrast and brightness features.
“Is this the right chapter?” Gabriel asks me. He stands to one side and offers me his chair.
I sit down and squint at the pages crammed with the familiar hurried, slanted writing. Maybe Dyslexic Stoner was onto something about there being a picture hidden within the words. But no matter how much I try to blur my vision, nothing really comes together.This isn’t a Magic Eye kids’ book, I remind myself. It’s supposed to be a remembrance of gay history. That’s why it pointed to Harvey’s birthday flyer as a clue. Solving this thing means uncovering something important, something real.
For whatever reason, this only makes tackling the next piece of the puzzle seem a million times harder. I sigh andturn my attention over to the one feature in the book Cam and I fixated on when we started the hunt: the endless tiny grids filled with numbers.
“There,” I say, my finger tapping the last page. “This is definitely Harvey’s chapter.”
I’m pointing to a tiny tic-tac-toe grid and an X grid set into the bottom right corner of the third and final page spread. There are several numbers jumbled inside the grids, with two or more numbers sharing the same spot. Other spots, notably, are blank.
Actually, it was Cam who first noticed the blank areas when we pored through the book years ago.
“What’s that about?” he had asked.
I was still trying to figure out the words themselves—if there was a larger riddle within them. I lost my place in one sentence. “What’s what about?”
“The blanks here,” he said. He opened a drawer in his desk and dug around, random items clanking like cartoon sound effects until—“Aha!”—he pulled out a chipped magnifying glass and hovered it over the grids.
“There’s something to this.”
I rolled my eyes. “There’s something to everything, Cam. That’s the entire point.”
“No, I mean these numbers are different from the rest. The way they’re stacked in some places and missing in others. And look here…there’s a dot next to two of the numbers.”
He cut the air in half with a tiny gasp. “It’s a pigpen cipher.”
I didn’t have to ask what that was. We had been making a master list of ciphers ever since we’d watchedNational Treasure. Book ciphers, Playfair ciphers, Caesar ciphers—we knew them all.
A pigpen cipher splits up all the letters of the alphabet into four grids: two tic-tac-toe grids and two X grids, one of each type with dots in the spaces.
A letter goes into every space, and you figure out that letter’s symbol from where it sits in the grid and if it has a dot or not. Meaning most messages coded in pigpen look like a sort of alien language.
for “gay.”
for “treasure.”
You’re supposed to read the symbol and then find the corresponding place in the grid where the correct letter goes. Simple enough. But the grids inGay Treasures, the ones Cam was indicating, seemed anything but simple. One tic-tac-toe grid and one X grid, with only numbers inside. No letters. No alien symbols. And no encrypted pigpen message anywhere else in the book.
“How is it a pigpen cipher?” I asked incredulously.
“Well, look.” Cam pointed at the numbers with dots underneath them. “BGR combined the four grids into two.”
